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By Laura Riding With postscript by Laura (Riding) Jackson Afterword by Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark Persea Books, 1993 |
"Laura Riding was a widely respected American poet and critic when she wrote these letters to the eight-year-old daughter of her English friends Robert Graves, a fellow writer, and Nancy Nicholson, an artist. She had gone to England in 1926 and there had established, with Robert Graves, the Seizin Press. Among their early publications--all handprinted--was a short work by Gertrude Stein, to whom the epigraph letter here is addressed. By 1930, the year of this book's publication, they had moved their press to Majorca." --Elizabeth Friedmann and Alan J. Clark, from the Afterword
"Give this volume to a child: it tells so simply that an adult may find it difficult, how it is good to live straight, independently of the tortuous conventions of others." --Michael Roberts, in The Poetry Review (1930)
First Letter (excerpt)
by Laura Riding
Dear Catherine,
Do you remember the time you asked me about policemen? And I told you about policemen? And when I had finished you said: "Do you know, Laura, sometimes I know everything about everything too?"
When I told you about policemen you did not say "How do you know that?" or "Where did you learn that?" You believed me. And you believed me because I told you what I thought about policemen. I told you why I thought that they were good and why I thought that they were bad. I did not tell you that in New York policemen carried clubs or that in France policemen wore capes. If I had told you things like that instead of what I thought, you would not have believed me. You would have thought that I was telling you a story.
Yes, I too know everything about everything. But only, of course, if I stop to think about it--only sometimes, like you, though more often, of course. You are only a little girl, and so when you stop to think it is more often to think about yourself than about everything. But as you grow up you will get to know yourself so well that you will not have to stop to think about it at all. You will just be yourself all the time and sometimes stop to think about everything. And if you really are yourself all the time, when you do stop to think about everything you will certainly know everything about it--as you do now, only more often. For if you know everything about yourself, then you are so clear and bright that you light up everything around you. And when you stop to look at it you naturally see everything there is to see about it.
The good thing about children is that if noone interferes with them they do stop to think about themselves. Childhood is the time when people should be bothered with nothing but themselves. After childhood there is a time between childhood and grown-up-hood called adolescence, just before you begin frequently knowing everything about everything. It is a rather awkward time because people treat you sometimes like a child and sometimes like a grown-up, and you your self are not sure which you are. I think the best way out of it is not to worry which you are, but to be yourself, and then it will not matter how people treat you. For if you are yourself being yourself or being a grown-up is all the same thing as far as you yourself are concerned. A grown-up who doesn't first know everything about himself can't know everything about everything. And even if a grown-up does know everything about everything, the important thing is knowing everything about oneself, because that is where knowing everything about everything must begin from. . . .
Third Letter (excerpt)
by Laura Riding
Well, then, what is the good of learning? The good of learning is this: that it can cheer up doing that is real doing, just as if you had to peel potatoes a great deal it would be a relief to shell peas. But with learning you do not even shell the peas, you just pretend, so that you don't get tired as you would if you really did shell peas, although you don't get the real pleasure of really shelling peas after you have been really peeling potatoes. Another good thing about learning is this: that it can give you a good idea of all kinds of doing in case for some reason you have a poor idea of doing. And by giving you this idea of doing it can perhaps make you feel the doing side of yourself so strongly that you may say to yourself: "I understand now what it is to make a chair, or to be Hittites conquering, or Egyptians conquered, that is, I feel more definitely what being alive is, and so I can give myself up more freely to thinking, which I do more freely than doing." And this is a very good use of learning if you are the sort of person to whom thinking is more natural than doing or who at any rate doesn't want to do a lot of doing in order to feel more definitely what being alive is. On the other hand, a person might get a more definite feeling of what being alive is in really doing than in just learning. She might go on and on learning and never be able to stop, or she might deceive herself that learning was thinking because it was not doing. Or she might fall in love with learning just because it seemed to be doing and because it made her feel not so much wise as strong. Still, we must not say that learning is of no use at all. . . .
Copyright © 1997 by the Board of Literary Management of the late Laura (Riding) Jackson
Updated 12 June 1997 || ottotwo@email.unc.edu